Otherwise, the theatre has, in recent weeks, been productive of nothing worth leaving the bar at Sardi's to assume a spectator role. A couple of extremely dubious thrillers, The Visitor and Meet a Body, have reared their drowsy heads, and, even as this is being conveyed to the printers, a something called Men to the Sea is disappearing in the mists of theatrical yesterdays.
Rose Franken's Soldier's Wife, although it never for a minute clicke during its opening night performance at the John Golden, was at least characterized by a legitimacy of thesis an a sort of timeliness better handled, perhaps, in women's magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements than on the speaking stage. There is going to be an astounding amount of unabashed space- filler copy written about the so-calle“problem of the returning soldier,”a problem which scarcely exists at all in fact, but which germinates unceasingly in the minds of lady editors, special writers, and home-advice columnists. Every angle of the industrial, economic, amorous, and killer-tendency“problems,”is being exploited by“experts,”and the unhappy warrior who wishes for nothing so much as to get the hell out of the army and return to his routine life, whatever it may have been, is finding himself more and more a clinical specimen and the object of nauseatingly sympathetic and understanding endearments from females instructed in the proper technique. Miss Franken attempted to make some sense out of this maudlin and patronizing state of affairs, but her usually sure touch failed her.
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